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I was already very happy with the presentation of the Readers, but I find myself getting so much more from these stories now that the furigana are hidden and there are sound bites matching the sentence breakdowns. Thanks Makoto Plus team for all the brilliant work you do!
Thanks! I’m glad to hear the changes are improvements. I was expecting a few people to not like the hidden furigana, but so far, I’ve heard nothing but positive comments. If the furigana is always visible, it’s too easy to just read the hiragana.
I’ll keep adding the sound bites to the stories. Thanks for the feedback!
You seem to be a bit of a HTML wizard Clay. I’m sure you have enough to do to keep you busy, but when I’m reading and listening to longer stories (and Nihongo no Tane) I often wish that the sound controls would stay visible on the screen while scrolling the text, to enable stop-start and skipping without going back to the top of the page or running two windows. Is this something your magic HTML wand can do?
I know only enough to be dangerous. Haha. But that’s an excellent idea. I’ll look into it.
I just made the audio controls “sticky” for this page. Do you think it is in the way, though, since this page already has audio for each line?
Here it is for the latest Nihongo no Tane:
https://makotoplus.com/podcast-nihongonotane-123-m/
What do you think?
The “sticky” audio controls are fantastic, better than I imagined they could be, thanks for doing that so quickly. I don’t find that they are in the way on this page, at least not on my computer, but I was wondering how they might be used. I think they would make it easy to listen to the whole story, pause to use the line breakdown to focus on the audio and grammar of difficult sentences, then return to listening to the whole story.
That’s a good way to use it. That way, you can “hear/read” the whole story, but pause to concentrate on a tricky line or two along the way.
I’ll try to remember to add this to future longish pages. If you find a page you’d like to see the sticky audio, please just leave a comment there and I’ll add it.